Week 49’22 Insight Pills – and (for the last time) one more thing…
What’s called my attention and might be insightful for you too…
A quick recap in case this is the first time you read this…
My plan for the weekly insight pills is rather simple: to make a weekly consolidation of stuff that called my attention, relates to the overarching theme of this blog/newsletter, and share it across over here. With some comment of my own on top.
Once more this time, it’s possible to build a sort of loosely coupled narrative of coherence across the topics.
The Tragedy of the Perpendicular – or the tail that wags the dog…
Dave Aron once again shared a thoughtful LinkedIn post (see below with the link in the image as well). I never heard of that as a concept as such, but I definitely have observed evidences of that.
I would add that, in my opinion, one area where that occurred in recent decades, is on how we treat the interplay between strategy, plans and execution, too often letting the latter subject to the other two, which is, to a large extent, the tail wagging the dog. Since it is execution which makes it or breaks it– and one could even argue that figuring out your strategy in a more emergent basis and thus planning as you go along, is much more aligned to the dynamic fast-paced world we live in.
Which is a nice segway to the next highlight.
Managing stakeholders and (product) priorities in a statistically sound basis
Teresa Torres shared two articles, in her ‘worthy read’ typical post on LinkedIn, which were indeed worth reading… The first one by Jeff Gothelf on dealing with HIPPO (highest paid person opinions), which seem to ‘procreate’ quite well in a complex digital corporation world. There are a few aspects I wanted to bring up from the article, as a summary:
The importance of taking the conversation from a deterministic to a probabilistic context – after all, everyone’s opinion should be treated, fundamentally, by what they are – one (possibly amongst many) hypothesis.
To approach any new event, like a conversation about what should be done next, without the bias of past success as a predictor of future success – as chances are that HIPPOs has made their fame for getting something really right at some point, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is the case now.
And to manage the relationship in a productive fashion, which may mean giving something in attempt to validate the hypothesis before you go all the way, for instance.
As an underlying foundation, it is critical to have a sound understanding of basic statistics behavior in a very practical sense. And this FS blog is a good reminder of that. I particularly enjoyed the part of regression to the mean, and how we should look at achievements in slightly sceptical fashion if there is not yet a track record to help us to distinguish the probability of being cheer luck from true ability.
And speaking about managing relationships…
My ‘frequent flyer’ John Cutler, once more, nailed something in the head! And I think it’s a good connection with the previous topic on handling stakeholders. Because the more there are possible misperceptions (or perception asymmetries, to use the term that John used) about you by others, the higher the chance of you getting forced to have to ‘swallow a frog’ because of a HIPPO, for instance.
So, it is quite relevant that you figure out what kind of perception asymmetries might be out there, about you, influencing possible decisions that may even impact you, for instance. And I thought it was very insightful the observation that, in a way, the richer (or more complex, diverse, however you want to put it) you are in terms of skills and capabilities, the harder it gets to manage that. Which resonate a lot with me, as I would humbly, but also proudly, describe myself as fitting that difficult-to-put-on-a-box category.
This might have been a bit of a ‘blindspot’ to me, to so far not actively manage that in the best possible way.
One more thing – do you mind helping me to get better at this?
It has been a bit less than a couple of months since I started this initiative of The Conceptual Leader blog/newsletter. Trying to keep it true to my overarching continuous improvement mindset as well as my customer-orientation, I would like to kindly ask some structured feedback.
If you are up for it, please fill up this survey and help me to turn this more fit-for-(your-)purpose! It shouldn’t take you long.
So… it’s a wrap for this week…
And I hope you found this insightful. I would love to ‘hear’ if you have any feedback or even some suggestion on what I am doing here.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact